TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “Nature does nothing in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index F > Category: Food Web

Food Web Quotes (8 quotes)


About two-thirds of the oxygen in our atmosphere is produced in the surface waters of the sea by phytoplankton, the minute forms of algae that give the sea its slightly green hue, and which initiate the entire food web of the ocean.
In 'Ocean Policy and Reasonable Utopias', The Forum (Summer 1981), 16, No. 5, 899-900.
Science quotes on:  |  Algae (7)  |  Atmosphere (117)  |  Entire (50)  |  Food (213)  |  Form (976)  |  Green (65)  |  Initiate (13)  |  Minute (129)  |  Ocean (216)  |  Oxygen (77)  |  Phytoplankton (2)  |  Produced (187)  |  Sea (326)  |  Surface (223)  |  Two (936)  |  Water (503)

All Nature is linked together by invisible bonds and every organic creature, however low, however feeble, however dependent, is necessary to the well-being of some other among the myriad forms of life.
From Man and Nature (1864), 109.
Science quotes on:  |  Being (1276)  |  Bond (46)  |  Creature (242)  |  Dependent (26)  |  Ecology (81)  |  Feeble (28)  |  Form (976)  |  Invisible (66)  |  Life (1870)  |  Low (86)  |  Myriad (32)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Necessary (370)  |  Organic (161)  |  Other (2233)  |  Symbiosis (4)  |  Together (392)  |  Web Of Life (9)  |  Well-Being (5)

Food is the burning question in animal society, and the whole structure and activities of the community are dependent upon questions of food-supply.
(1960)
Science quotes on:  |  Activity (218)  |  Animal (651)  |  Burning (49)  |  Community (111)  |  Dependent (26)  |  Ecology (81)  |  Food (213)  |  Food Chain (7)  |  Question (649)  |  Society (350)  |  Structure (365)  |  Supply (100)  |  Whole (756)  |  Zoology (38)

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms.
Concluding remarks in final chapter, The Origin of Species (1859), 490.
Science quotes on:  |  Action (342)  |  Bank (31)  |  Being (1276)  |  Bird (163)  |  Character (259)  |  Complex (202)  |  Condition (362)  |  Consequence (220)  |  Construct (129)  |  Different (595)  |  Direct (228)  |  Divergence (6)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Extinction (80)  |  Form (976)  |  Growth (200)  |  High (370)  |  Increase (225)  |  Indirect (18)  |  Inheritance (35)  |  Insect (89)  |  Interesting (153)  |  Kind (564)  |  Largest (39)  |  Law (913)  |  Lead (391)  |  Natural Selection (98)  |  Plant (320)  |  Produced (187)  |  Ratio (41)  |  Reproduction (74)  |  Selection (130)  |  Sense (785)  |  Singing (19)  |  Struggle (111)  |  Use (771)  |  Various (205)  |  Worm (47)

There are some viviparous flies, which bring forth 2,000 young. These in a little time would fill the air, and like clouds intercept the rays of the sun, unless they were devoured by birds, spiders, and many other animals.
Oeconomia Naturae, The Oeconomy of Nature. Trans Benjamin Stillingfleet, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Natural History (1775), revised edition, 1777, 119.
Science quotes on:  |  Air (366)  |  Animal (651)  |  Bird (163)  |  Breeding (21)  |  Cloud (111)  |  Devour (29)  |  Fly (153)  |  Little (717)  |  Other (2233)  |  Prey (13)  |  Ray (115)  |  Spider (14)  |  Sun (407)  |  Time (1911)  |  Viviparous (2)  |  Young (253)

There is no waste in functioning natural ecosystems. All organisms, dead or alive, are potential sources of food for other organisms. A caterpillar eats a leaf; a robin eats the caterpillar; a hawk eats the robin. When the plant, caterpillar, robin, and hawk die, they are in turn consumed by decomposers.
From Resource Conservation and Management (1990), 101.
Science quotes on:  |  Alive (97)  |  Caterpillar (5)  |  Consume (13)  |  Dead (65)  |  Death (406)  |  Eat (108)  |  Ecosystem (33)  |  Food (213)  |  Hawk (4)  |  Leaf (73)  |  Natural (810)  |  Organism (231)  |  Other (2233)  |  Plant (320)  |  Potential (75)  |  Robin (4)  |  Source (101)  |  Turn (454)  |  Waste (109)

There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.
Letter to Asa Gray (22 May 1860). In Charles Darwin and Francis Darwin (ed.), Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters (1892), 236. [Perhaps Darwin would have been interested to know that these parasitic wasps (Ichneumonidae, also known as Darwin wasps) have now been used for biological control of insect pests in orchards, crops and forests, with the benefit of reducing the need for harmful pesticides. —Webmaster]
Science quotes on:  |  Beneficent (9)  |  Cat (52)  |  Express (192)  |  God (776)  |  Intention (46)  |  Living (492)  |  Misery (31)  |  Myself (211)  |  Omnipotent (13)  |  World (1850)

Three hundred trout are needed to support one man for a year. The trout, in turn, must consume 90,000 frogs, that must consume 27 million grasshoppers that live off of 1,000 tons of grass.
From Energetics, Kinetics, and Life: An Ecological Approach (1971), 293.
Science quotes on:  |  Consume (13)  |  Ecology (81)  |  Frog (44)  |  Grass (49)  |  Grasshopper (8)  |  Hundred (240)  |  Live (650)  |  Man (2252)  |  Million (124)  |  Must (1525)  |  Need (320)  |  Support (151)  |  Thousand (340)  |  Ton (25)  |  Trout (4)  |  Turn (454)  |  Year (963)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.